Thursday, April 22, 2010

I noticed that my email today had no shortage of "Earth Day" come-ons of a nautical nature as Cruising Compass and others ran some content of a "green" nature... Well, if you can call running a couple ads touting sort of green stuff as content. The one bit of content which really was content was of the simplistic don't-throw-stuff-overboard sort of thing.

Of course, anyone dependent on advertising is not going to be doing any "get-in-your-face-don't-consume-more-than-you-need" hard hitting journalism or editorials, as that would fly in the face of selling you stuff and that, my friends, is what journalism is all about these days... getting you to buy stuff.

Getting you to buy stuff to be green is sort of... well, the words COUNTER PRODUCTIVE spring to mind.

If you really want to be green and do something good for old Mother Nature, try not replacing anything on your boat that does not need replacing... and by needing to be replaced means it no longer works and is really, really needed.

Yeah, I know that means you will have to have a GPS that does not also work as a DVD player, a VHF that does not keep phone numbers in memory, or that bigger display for the radar that doubles as a 3D entertainment center or whatever...

This whole sailing gig is not about buying stuff and consumption... Or at least it should not be. Some time ago, MadMariner/NavaGear did an article about good blogs to read and he included Boat Bits which I found both pleasing and depressing. The fact that he included me as a "boating gear blog" has made me re-examine what Boat Bits has been doing and to tell you the truth depressed me as the last thing Boat Bits wants to be is just another "go-buy-this-gear" sort of place to hang out. We can do better than that...

We need to do better than that.

The sad fact is that considering the sorry state of the world and the clusterfuck of problems facing us that we should be doing a whole lot more than rolling out the "don't throw stuff overboard", "use bio-degradeable soap", and "use our advertisers folding prop" articles once a year on Earth Day and then pimping non essential gear and practices the rest of the 364 days of the year...

As the great Sam Cooke often sang, "A Change is Gonna Come" ... and things won't be the same old same down the line. If you think that we can all continue to have our cake and eat it too, I have a steel tower for sale in Paris you might be interested in.

On the other hand, if you are not as dumb as nails, get smarter about the very real problems and do the right thing.